Many of us are very excited with all the new features that SharePoint 2013 has to offer and may be thinking about upgrading in the next six to twelve months. But before we get into the details of how to upgrade SharePoint from 2010 to 2013, let's go through the following ten clean up tasks that you can do to best prepare your environment for the upgrade:
Task
Benefits
Delete unused or underused site collections and sub-webs
Reduce risk and improve performance
Check large lists (lists with lots of data)
Improve performance and user experience
Reorganize content document libraries by folders, which provides these benefits:
- Folder level permission
- Default metadata value
Delete excess columns from wide lists (lists with too many columns) or remove wide lists
Wide lists can cause an upgrade to fail
Consider moving site collections into separate databases
The number of site collections allowed per database is lower in SP2013:
- SP2010: 15,000 site collections per database
- SP2013: 5,000 site collections per databases
Upgrade to SP2013 will fail if a database contains more than 5000 site collections
Remove extraneous document versions
Large numbers of versions can slow down an upgrade significantly or crash the upgrade altogether
Remove unused templates, features, and Web Parts
Platform hygiene and obsolete components may cause the upgrade to fail
Remove PowerPoint Broadcast sites
It is no longer available in 2013
Finish Visual Upgrades in SharePoint 2010
All sites will move to 2010 experience automatically after the upgrade to SP2013
If there are sites that are still running in MOSS mode, they may not work after the farm is upgraded to SP2013
Check databases for duplicate or orphaned site collections
Platform hygiene and improve performance
Clean up Health Analyzer issues
Platform hygiene and minimize risks for the upgrade